In our July 9, 2025 post (last week)—in the context of the current dehumanization, through terrorization, detention, and deportation, of immigrants in the United States— we noted the views shared by historian Timothy Snyder and Rabbi Marc Gellman, respectively, that the killing of fourteen million humans in the “bloodlands” between 1933 and 1945 “was personal,” and that large numbers “can blunt our sense of the individuality of each one”; and that the horror of the September 11, 2001 attack is most accurately captured not by the “bigness” of the number of lives lost, but by the “smallness” of each life lost—in “the small searing death of one person….one world at a time.”
Today we’ll continue exploring this American shadow tradition of dehumanization and consider the role that the myth of separability plays therein.
Notes and Sources
Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, (Random House, 1988), 689-90.
Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism, (North Atlantic, 2021), 20, 164-65.
Ibid., 165.
Various versions of this quote are available. Scholars who cite it often cite it differently than I do here. My source offers several versions and even considers how accurate the translation from the German to the English is: https://www.thymindoman.com/einsteins-misquote-on-the-illusion-of-feeling-separate-from-the-whole/
Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, (Basic, 2010), 407-408.
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